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036 Now that so much attention is being focused on the new excavations around the Gihon Spring and Hezekiah’s Tunnel—which was built as a defense against a siege by the Assyrian leader Sennacherib—it may be time to look at the siege itself...

054 We have already established the location of the Herodian Temple in Jerusalem and the altar that once stood in front of it (see the previous installment of this article in “Sacred Geometry: Unlocking the Secret of the Temple Mount, Part 1,”...

050 The mystery deepens. As if the perplexing graves at Qumran were not enough, the same unusual type of tomb has now been discovered in southern Jerusalem. None of these tombs looks remotely like the typical Jerusalem tomb from the same period,...

020 To say that you should throw out all your books on the archaeology of Jerusalem would be going too far, especially since I wrote two of them.1 But it is true that books on the archaeology of Jerusalem, including my own, now contain a lot of...

023 We should have a very good idea what Jesus’ tomb looked like, with the references in the Gospels and our knowledge of contemporaneous tombs found in and around Jerusalem. Yet until now, most of the reconstructions of this most famous of tombs...

026 In putting together this issue’s article on the Antiquities Problem (“The Great MFA Exposé”), our thoughts turned to unprovenanced objects that can now be studied by scholars because they were bought on the market. If these important remnants...

January 1, 2000…The biggest birthday any of us will ever live through,” trumpeted the New York Times in announcing the Millennium Series in its Sunday magazine. Newspapers predict that as many as 1.5 million people will crowd Times Square at midnight, December 31, 1999, watched...

Three gospels tell of the devil testing Jesus in the wilderness, an incident so remarkable as to seem almost certainly unreal. But is it? Our author suggests a historical core to the tale, a substratum reflecting struggles Jesus faced in his lifetime.

We like to think of Holy Writ as unchanging, but the ancients didn’t. A study of the Dead Sea Scrolls reveals that texts could exist in different forms—even be consciously modified—without losing their sanctity.

022 A fierce conflagration marked the end of Canaanite Hazor. Across the site, a thick layer of ashes and charred wood—in places 3 feet deep—attests to the intensity of the blaze in the northern Galilee city. Within the walls of Hazor’s palace,...

Dead Sea Scroll scholars have long debated the identity of the shadowy figure described in the scrolls as the Teacher of Righteousness. But was he a historical figure or someone expected at the end of time?

034 Rarely do Biblical texts and extra-Biblical materials supplement one another so well as those that describe the last two decades before the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem, which marked the end of the Judahite state in 586 B.C.E. As a...

048 Here’s a brief look at the sites that will be accepting volunteers for the 1999 season, some of the important discoveries made in the past and what the dig directors plan for the upcoming season. Pertinent past BAR articles on the sites are...